Australian-born actor Geoffrey Rush holds the Triple Crown of acting awards—an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, with credits that include The King’s Speech, Les Misèrables and his role as Captain Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Now Rush, 65, plays Albert Einstein in the TV miniseries Genius, which began airing April 25 at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic Channel.

How did you make Genius more than just a history lesson?

[Executive producer] Ron Howard came in firing on all cylinders. Genius is an epic story of the great scientific revolution of the late 19th century and the two World Wars that devastated the planet.

How did you portray Einstein the man?

Einstein could play the violin as well as deal with intricate equations about how the mathematics of the universe might work. You try not to underscore too much that he was a walking computer.

Did you and Johnny Flynn, who plays the younger Einstein in Genius, coordinate your performances in any way?

Inevitably. I think Shine is the only other role I’ve played where I’ve been passed the baton in some nonlinear, narrative way, where you are playing the same character. So inevitably you question, what are the similarities? How do we try and make the audience enable that shift from one age group to another? It doesn’t happen in a straightforward way.

Einstein as a youth was extremely anti-authoritarian. He hated the German military, so he abandoned his German passport and became a citizen of the world. I think he knew he had a gift and he wanted to create the best circumstances in which he could explore his insatiable curiosity.

So we just played around with how different he was when he was a teenager and how different he was when he was in his 50s, 60s and 70s and what were the seeds from his early self. Johnny and I did some improv work, where we interviewed each other, which was a good exercise.

Surprisingly, Einstein had a messy personal life.

There was a suggestion of that, yeah. He wanted to be a very progressive citizen of the world. He was very footloose all through his studies and very contrary and challenging to any academic or social authority. And then there were a number of major relationships that he had with people, many of which foundered, because he was also an intellectual hermit. He knew he had a gift and he knew that he had to go into retreat to fulfill his obsessions of asking questions that nobody in the conventional or the orthodox scientific community seemed to be asking.

I remember reading in Walter Isaacson’s book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, there was some authority dude, an old-school patriarchal scientist at the end of the 19th century, that said, “Well, that’s physics. We’ve discovered everything. There’s nothing more we can do.” Einstein turned 300 years of thinking on its head and said, “What if I travel at the speed of light? What would I look like next to a beam? What would happen?” He was a daydreamer.

Are you a daydreamer like Einstein? Is that a level on which you connected with him?

I read a book, a very influential book in my youth, by Arthur Koestler called The Act of Creation. He did a wonderful study of the jester, the sage and the scientist. He was trying to find a formula for what makes a joke work, what makes a scientific eureka moment happen and what makes art exponentially radical. So all of those things influenced me a lot, because they all come about by putting things together that no one else has seen before.

In my studies, I found [Arthur] Schopenhauer and I went, “This is great. He’s German.” I don’t know a lot about him, but he had this great definition that said, “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. But genius hits a target that no one else can see.”

Was it Archimedes in the bath who said, “I sat in my bath and it was full, so the amount of water that spilled out of it must be my body mass.” You know what I mean?

Those moments, they’re aha moments.

Yeah, it’s an aha moment and they’re all geeks. That’s what they’re after. Whether it’s Steve Jobs, saying, “I can see it. Everyone will have a phone in their hand and that’s all they’ll need.” In my childhood, I thought phones were a black, Bakelite object that you had in the sitting room and that was about it.

What can you tease about Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, opening May 26?

There are a few revelations and troublesome, personal, anguished secrets from his past. Also, Salazar [Javier Bardem] has resurfaced after 25 years in purgatory. His motivation is to annihilate every existing pirate.

What do you enjoy about playing Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean?

That’s one of the great pleasures because he keeps shifting from being the demonic villain. I think one of the characters described him as being spat out of hell. He’s the personification of ruthlessness, narcissism and self-serving survival. Then they sort of turned him into a politician, so he keeps morphing in each chapter.

You do a lot of serious films, like The King’s Speech and Shine. Is Pirates a nice change?

You do have a good time. That franchise has been a part of my life now for 15 years. But I like to think that I approach it as playfully and as seriously as any other job I do, because there are always extra dimensions in the character you’re looking for, to not just play out the predictable tropes. I like the contradictions and surprises.

Why did it take you until age 44 to become a film actor?

I did bits of films. I did gigs with colleagues who were studying at film school in Sydney. I was in all their short films when I was in my late 20s and 30s. But I was so absorbed with theater, I never identified myself as being a film actor.

How did you make the switch from theater to film actor?

I just set myself the task of getting a little bit more familiar with how the camera can work. I’ve always been a great fan of silent cinema because that’s the syntax. That’s when it was born. I know the works of George Méliès and the early work the Lumière brothers did. Even in Australia, we had a very vibrant silent film industry. I loved the gags the great clowns—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle—used to do.

The film actors I admired were completely different beasts. As a young actor I was watching that golden age of American cinema and the decline of the studios—the whole Easy Rider/Raging Bull turnaround, from the films of Arthur Penn to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. I used to watch those films and be so in awe of how they put that together, like a jigsaw, knowing that they’re shooting it on random days and they don’t actually get to do it in a row in the same way that you do it in the theater.

As far as the films that came my way, Shine, in particular, had a very idiosyncratic, wildly unpredictable, central protagonist that didn’t seem to fit the more conventional, acceptable notions of what the central hero was. It was in that great period of the ’90s.

AMG/Parade Digital

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